About FM-Alive
Who is this guy?
I started FM programming in 1988 and wrote an editor and librarian for the DX7 in 8086 assembler
for the PC. Back in those days the Atari ST was the "serious" musicians computer,
but it seemed the future would belong to the
PC, even though a 10mb hard disk set you back about the same as a 200GB
disk now.
I wanted to simplify the fiendishly difficult task of creating musically interesting sounds on the DX and cut the
cost of storing patches. At the time Yamaha's memory cartridges cost around £45
and they stored just 32 voices, roughly 3.5k ! That made the alternative of storing
stuff on the PC seem really attractive.
My DOS-based DX7 editor is still
available and works under Windows, right up to XPSP2. Although
it's small - 25k- you can edit any DX patch with it and use it to manage your patches in much the same way as
my current editor DX Manager.
VB and the SY series
One of my goals in trying to make FM
programming more intuitive was to enable you to hear the results of your editing
in real-time using graphics for sound shaping. That was well beyond my ability/lifetime
in DOS, but then Visual Basic arrived and was the ideal tool for the job. VB's arrival in the early 90's
more or less coincided with Yamaha's final attempt to recreate the success of the
DX7 before ditching FM, the SY77.
The result - SY Manager v1.0 was published on Compuserv
in 1993. It is still the only full featured, graphical editor and librarian available
for the SY77/SY99.
Like many people,
I found the SY's sounds a bit thin in comparison to the DX7. So I wrote a patch
converter, X2Y, that gives accurate conversions of those nice fat DX patches. X2Y
will read any DX file format - handly if you've got some really ancient patches
lying around.
DX Manager
SY Manager filled a niche in FM programming and encouraged me to go back to the classic DX7 after a 15 year gap to develop a completely
new editor/librarian. Imaginatively called DX Manager and with just about every
patch management feature I could think of, Version 1 was released in April 2002.
.Net and Version 2
From the mail I've received about DXM in the last four years, most users
found it "does what it says on the tin" with only a handful of bugs reported ( and resolved).
But four years in the IT business is a lifetime and, sure enough, the programmers' world changed radically again
when Microsoft brought out its' .Net answer to life the universe and everything.
I decided to rewrite DXM for the .Net environment - which is awesome - and also
to add new features that would have been practically impossible in VB6.
Nearly three years later I've released DXM2 as shareware - a first for me after giving away '000s of
copies of my programs over the years. However my other programs will remain as freeware.
An interesting feature of DXM2 is ClickOnce technology. This does way with the clunky
setup and installation techniques that have been around since the dawn of time. Now all you have to do
is click once on the DXM2 page here on FM-Alive and the application downloads
and installs itself automatically on your PC (actually two clicks if you include the Legal stuff).
It also then checks periodically for updates and downloads them in the background. Working this into DXM took
me a long way from MIDI programming but I've enjoyed reworking the site in ASP.net2.
Future plans
Next on the block is a rewrite of SY Manager for .Net - hopefully with what I've learnt
this will take a lot less than three years ( currently aiming for early 2007 release).
I also plan to make DXM3 support Yamaha's 4 operator synths like the TX81Z, DX9 and also the
Grey Matter Reponse E! card - programming which appears even more challenging than .Net.
The DX7 sound is so strong and unmistakably FM that the synth deserves a better future than just
ending up as a software "clone". Today, there is huge interest in creating new and original music using
classic synth technology. So if you are one of the 160,000 DX7 owners out there, get it down out of the loft
and enjoy making real music again.
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